77 Quotes by Lucia Berlin

Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.

Most American women are very uncomfortable about having servants. They don’t know what to do while you are there.

I’ll bet the Catholic Church lost out on a lot of would-be nuns when they started dressing like ordinary meter maids.

The first mystery was that the rows of candles under each of the statues of Jesus and Mary and Joseph were all flickering and trembling as if there were gusts of wind when in fact the vast church was shut tight and none of the heavy doors were open. I believed that the spirit of God in the statues was so strong it made the candles flutter and hiss, tremulous with suffering. Each tiny burst of light lit up the caked blood on Jesus’s bony white feet and it looked wet.

Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept.

Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five.

But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn’t feel?

Her smile, though, no, it was her laugh, a dusky, deep cascading laughter that caught the joy, implied and mocked the sorrow in every joy.

Often they wore their hair in pin curls and a turban, getting their hair ready for – what? This still is an American custom. You see women everywhere in pink hair rollers. It’s some sort of philosophical or fashion statement. Maybe there will be something better, later.